The Gnome Desktop environment roadmap has been updated; the release has been pushed back from march to september 2010. The rumors about Gnome 3 started in early 2008. The plan was to avoid major user-visible changes, and limit the update to cleaning up the code.

After a few updated in the roadmap, the Gnome Foundation decided the user interface should get an update as well. Version 3.0 will introduce a new desktop shell, built with the Clutter toolkit. It will also feature a new tool named Zeitgeist, which is a journal-like alternative to conventional file management.